Day: September 20, 2018

Yesterday evening, Cristiano Midnight, the owner of the SLUniverse (SLU) discussion forum (the largest and longest-running community site dedicated to Second Life), posted the following message:

So a lot has happened in the past 24 hours. I nearly lost 2.4 million posts and obliterated SLU, got them back, perhaps may have cried a little, then made some decisions about what to do about SLU.

I detailed what I was going through my mind in this post, so I won’t repeat it. However, since writing that, I made some rapid decisions that are already in motion.

First of all, I am launching a new site – VirtualVerse, which expands the scope of SLU to all things related to virtual worlds, whether it is Second Life, Sansar, other VR worlds that are gaining in popularity, or game related worlds like MMOs and open world games. I’ve wanted to become less SL centric, but it has been hard to do that with SL as part of the name.

The SLU forums will be closing within the next few weeks, depending on how long the transition takes. These forums will be archived – they may be unavailable for little while but will come back as a read only forum.

Why .one? There has been a significant number of new top level domains added, and I considered .cloud, .site and even .ninja, but .one appealed to me the most, since this also is starting over in many ways.

The new forums use Xenforo, not vBulletin. It is much more modern forum software, and fully supports mobile without needing an app. I purchased two gorgeous themes for it, one light and one dark, and have already installed an add on that allows me to add unlimited reaction buttons.

I’m looking into whether or not I can migrate user accounts from VB. If not, I will assist anyone in securing their name on the new site. I’ll have more information soon about all of this.

In the meantime, if you would like to help test out the new forums as I am getting them setup, they are already live.

I’m sure you will have lots of questions, and I still have some things to figure out and a lot of work to do, but SLU is going to live on, just in a different format.

I have been a fairly active member of SLUniverse since Sept. 18th, 2007 (just over eleven years), posting a total of 1,689 posts to various discussion threads in that time. It has always been a fun, free-wheeling place where anything and everything could happen. Some of the discussion threads have achieved legendary status!

Finnish game development studio Rovio is bringing its flagship property, Angry Birds, to one of the most forward-looking devices on the market, the Magic Leap One. First unveiled early last month, the One is the first commercially available mixed reality headset from secretive Florida startup Magic Leap, which has amassed more than $2 billion in funding to create what it thinks is the future of media. The company is not quite there yet, as my colleague Adi Robertson argued in her hands-on impressions of the headset.

But Rovio, in partnership with Swedish virtual and augmented reality developer Resolution Games, is signing on to be one of the earliest game makers to build for Magic Leap’s platform as it evolves. The result of that investment is Angry Birds: FPS (short for First Person Slingshot). The game is your standard Angry Birds experience: you’re given a set of colorful anthropomorphic birds and a slingshot, and the goal is to fling your feathered friends into increasingly elaborate wooden and stone structures to take out nefarious green pigs. Although this time around, the structures, birds, and slingshot appear as virtual and interactive 3D objects existing in the real world.

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I spent about 30 minutes playing the game, and I can say that it is a remarkably intuitive, high-fidelity, and an all-around impressive display for Rovio’s first foray into AR. The company worked closely with Resolution Games, which has experience making VR games, to develop the game first as a VR title and then later as a full-fledged AR one that runs exclusively on the Magic Leap One.

Although the field of view for the One is roughly 50 degrees and still quite limited compared to, say, a VR headset, I found that to be about the perfect width and height for a full stage of Angry Birds to exist in front of you on a standard coffee table. So it’s clear Rovio and Resolution designed the game with the One’s FOV top in mind.